The third man in Skripal case named
THE real name of the third Russian spy involved in the Salisbury nerve agent attack has been revealed as Denis Sergeyev.
The Daily Telegraph reported in September that British investigators believed a third GRU military intelligence officer came to the UK to reconnoitre Salisbury before the attempted hit on former Russian agent Sergei Skripal.
It later emerged that the man had come to Britain under the alias Sergei Fedotov, arriving the same day as Anatoly Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin, the agents who smeared the Novichok nerve agent on the door handle of Col Skripal’s home in March.
Now an investigation by Bellingcat, Russian site The Insider and Czech outlet Respekt claims Fedotov is Denis Vyacheslavovich Sergeyev, born on Sept 17 1973 in a military town in what is now Kazakhstan. They found he served in the army in southern Russia before studying at a military diplomatic academy in Moscow, the “GRU conservatory” that trains 100 officers each year.
The Telegraph uncovered additional information confirming Sergeyev’s GRU ties and found that the Russian authorities appear to have already made attempts to scrub his name from publicly available information.
A Moscow database showed Sergeyev was registered at the GRU conservatory. A woman with the same surname who was born in 1971, possibly Sergeyev’s wife, registered a Lada car at the same address. Sergeyev studied at the Suvorov military academy in Yekaterinburg, which in 1990, the year he graduated, was named the best Suvorov academy in the Soviet Union.
Although Sergeyev’s name and birth date can be seen in the archived preview of a list of academy graduates in online search results, the link leads to a blank space on the school’s site, suggesting that the list has only recently been taken down.
Bellingcat has said it will publish a report next week about the efforts to purge the names of the three Salisbury suspects from public records.
In 2010, Sergeyev received his fake “Fedotov” passport at the same Moscow desk that gave Chepiga and Mishkin their cover identity documents. The spy was known to have travelled extensively under the guise of Fedotov, and possibly even stayed in the UK after the attempt to poison Mr Skripal. He checked himself and his baggage off the flight back to Russia with Chepiga and Mishkin.
The Bellingcat investigation found that Sergeyev visited Barcelona undercover during the 2017 independence referendum. He came to London at least five times, including in the leadup to the Brexit referendum.
His visit to Bulgaria on April 28 2015 coincided with the suspected poisoning of a Bulgarian businessman who had sold arms to Ukraine. British investigators are currently in Bulgaria to examine whether that incident was related to Col Skripal’s poisoning.